VI

To-day, as P. C. Breagh sat paupered on the doorstep of St.

Dunstan's, he realized that, from childhood to this hour, dead

Milly's money had been his bane.

"When I was quite a little shaver I expected to be knocked under to,

and given the best of everything, because I was going to be rich one

day.... I knew my money kept my stepmother from grumbling and

nagging at me. And--my first thrashing at Rockhampton was because

I'd bragged about it to a bigger boy. He said when he let me get

up--that I should be obliged to him one day, if I wasn't at the

moment! And my first fight--no, my second--because the first was

over my Irish brogue!--my second fight came off because I'd forgotten

my lesson, and talked about being able to drive four-in-hand, and

live up to a Commission in the Household Cavalry when I should come

of age.... Silly young idiot! And when I was old enough for a

public school--and passed--I wonder, with my luck, how I managed to

pass?--into Bradenbury College--I had mills, no end! with the fellows

there, because I couldn't keep mum about my expectations."

He leaned his dusty elbows on his knees and went on thinking, as a

regular procession of legs of all sexes, ages, and colors went past,

and the muddy river of Fleet Street traffic roared over the

cobblestones, boiled in swirling eddies where it received the stream

flowing down Chancery Lane, and choked and gurgled in and out of the

squat archways of Temple Bar.

"I'd talked of Oxford as a preliminary to Sandhurst and a Cavalry

Commission--and I went in for an Exhibition Entrance--but my classics

queered me for the University. Knock Number One! The Head put it on

the Italianate Latin I'd learned from the Marist Fathers--and why old

Virgil, and Ovid, Horace, Cæsar, and Livy, and the rest of 'em,

should be supposed to have pronounced their language with a British

accent I've never been able to understand! ... When I went up for the

Woolwich Open Competitive--having altered my views about the

Household Cavalry!--my plane trigonometry dished me for the Royal

Horse Artillery.... Knock Number Two! So I told myself that it

wasn't as easy getting into a Queen's uniform as it was in my

father's time.... You were given the Commission--or you bought

it--and if you could drill, and march, and fight, no more was asked

of you.... And I tried for the Royal Engineering College of

India--and failed in dynamics--and had a shot for the I.C.S.--and

missed again! Oh, damn! And do I owe every one of the whole string

of failures to the belief that money makes up for everything and buys

anything? I'm half beginning to believe I do! Even the kindness I

have had from people I'd no claim on--and who is there alive I have a

claim on? Have I been cad enough--ape enough--worm enough--to put it

down to----Grrh!--how I loathe myself!"

He covered his reddened face with his hands and shuddered. It is

horrible to have to go on living inside a fellow you have begun to

hate.

"Even Father Haygarty's untiring kindness, his interest in all I did

and thought and hoped for.... Weren't there times when I suspected

that my--in some degree representing property--accounted for--oh,

Lord! And when he was dying and his housekeeper sent for me--for

he'd given up being an army chaplain and got a little living in

Gloucestershire--did I realize even then what a friend and father I

was losing? I hope to God I did, but I'm hardly sure of myself!"

He stubbed with the toe of his muddy boot the jutting corner of a

paving-stone, and scowled at the image of himself that was growing

more and more distinct. He had always thought P. C. Breagh rather a

fine young fellow. Now he knew him for what he had always been.

"When Father Haygarty was gone--it wasn't long before Mustey and Son

began to send explanations and apologies, instead of the whole of the

quarter's interest-money. There had been a drop in securities of

this kind and the other, and Consols were down--and at first I was as

pleased as a prize poodle at being made excuses to..... But the fact

remained that where I'd been getting two hundred and forty, I was

only getting one hundred and seventy-three.... And that--if I really

meant to go in for my Degree in Surgery and Medicine, for I'd made up

my mind to be a medical swell--I had--if Monica was to go on staying

with the Sisters!--I'd got to give up the idea of Edinburgh, or the

London University, and matriculate somewhere abroad. So I went to

Schwärz-Brettingen, and shared rooms with another English chap....

It was admitted I had solid abilities--the Professors whose lectures

I attended thought well of me. And I failed!--Failed for the fourth

time! Have I the accursed money to thank for that last blow?"

He perspired as though he had been running, and, indeed, nothing

takes it out of you like a spruit over the course of the past with

your conscience as pacer.

"I'd thought myself rather a fine fellow when, with my student-card

in my pocket and my _Anmeldungsbuch_ in my hand I called--in company

with a squad of other candidates--on the Rector Magnificus. We had a

punch afterwards, and a drive and coffee at the Plesse--and made a

night of it at Fritz's. I woke with a first-class student's headache

in the morning, and a hazy recollection that I'd told one or two of

the British colony--in confidence--and several Germans--about the

money I was coming into by-and-by...."

He ground his teeth and squeezed his eyelids together, trying to shut

out the picture of P. C. Breagh in the character of a howling cad.

"But if I bragged--and I did brag!--I worked.... The Marist Fathers

had grounded me in French and German in spite of myself, and my pride

had been nicely stung up by that failure for Sandhurst and the

others.... Men told me what I'd got to grind at, and I ground;

filling piles of lecture-pads with notes on all sorts of subjects.

Anatomy, physiology, physics, chemistry, botany, and zoology.... My

brain was a salad of 'em--but I passed the _Abiturienteti-Examen_ at

a classical gymnasium with a better certificate than a lot of other

Freshmen--thanks to the Marist Fathers, who'd pounded Latin and Greek

into me!--and then--after two years of walking hospitals, attending

demonstrations and lectures, and doing laboratory-work--varied by

beers and _schläger_--and more beers and more _schläger_!--and

perhaps I took to sword-play all the more kindly because of the

soldier-blood in me!--came the first regular examination. And I

don't forget that third of November--not while I'm breathing!"

_Donnerwetter_! P. C. Breagh could see the cocked-hatted and

scarlet-gowned University beadle ushering a pale young man, with

saucers round his eyes, into the awful presence of the Dean, and

Examiners in the Faculties of Surgery and Medicine....

The neophyte--arrayed in the swallow-tail coat, low-cut vest, black

cloth inexpressibles, white cravat, and kid gloves inseparable from

an English dinner-party, or the ordeal of examination at a German

university, found his inquisitors also in formal full dress, seated

in a semicircle facing the door, and looking singularly cheerful.

A solitary chair marked the middle of the chord of the arc formed by

the chairs of the examiners. Upon this stool of judgment--after

bowing and shaking hands all round and being bowed to and shaken--the

victim had been invited to seat himself. The Dean opened the ball

with the Early Theorists. And he had seemed quite to cotton to P. C.

Breagh's ideas on the subject of Egyptian Sacerdotal Colleges, the

preparation of Soma in the Vedas, the therapeutical formulas of

Zoroaster, Chinese sympathetic medicine--the dietetic method of

Hippocrates--who invented barley-water!--the observations of Diocles

and Chrysippus and the criticisms of Galen. At the expiration of

half an hour, when the Hofrath delivered him over to the next

examiner, P. C. Breagh had felt that, if the others were no worse

than the Dean, all might yet be well.

Professor Barselius, who followed the Dean, and was reported to be a

terror, when correctly replied to upon an interrogation as to the

chemical composition of the fatty acids, vouchsafed a grunt of

approbation.

Professor Troppenritt, who succeeded Barselius, was a person with a

reputation for amiability, and a mobility of mental constitution

which enabled him to flit like the butterfly or leap like the

grasshopper from subject to subject, harking back to Number One,

perhaps, when you felt quite sure he had done with it for good. But

on that fateful third of November a tricksy demon seemed to possess

Troppenritt. He no longer flitted like the butterfly, or hopped like

the grasshopper--he sported with the seven great departments of

Structural Anatomy, Physiology, Pathological Anatomy, General

Pathology, Ophthalmology, Medicine, Hygiene and Midwifery--as a

fountain might toss up glass balls, or a conjurer juggle with

daggers.... His victim after a while found himself breathlessly

watching the hugh knobby rampart of forehead, behind which the

Professor's intentions were hiding, in the vain hope that the next

question might be foreshadowed on its shining surface. A hope

destined never to be fulfilled....

The fact remains that P. C. Breagh, after some really creditable

answers, was beginning to recover the use of his mental faculties,

when the Dean--prompted by the candidate's evil genius--suggested a

little pause for cake and wine. It was awful to see how Hofrath and

Professors--there were three of them besides the conjurer

Troppenritt--enjoyed themselves at this sacrificial banquet, which

had been arranged upon a little table in a corner, waiting the

five-minute interval. And P. C. Breagh rejected cake, which was of

the gingerbread variety, garnished with blanched almonds and

sugar-plums. But the single glass of Rüdesheimer he accepted might

have been the Brobdingnagian silver-mounted horn that hung within a

garland of frequently-renewed laurel leaves upon the walls of a

famous students' beer-hall--or have been filled with raw spirits

above proof,--the contents mounted so unerringly to his head, and

wreaked such havoc therein.

The three remaining Professors were almost tender with the sufferer,

but what Troppenritt had begun, the wine had completed. The _nicht

wahr's_ had been succeeding one another at marked intervals,--like

distress-signals or funereal minute-guns, when the traditional three

hours expired.

P. C. Breagh--removed to cold storage in the anteroom--was detained

but five minutes longer.... His nervous shiverings had reached a

crescendo, when the beadle opened the door.... And the Dean,

stepping forward, in staccato accents delivered himself:

"Candidate, from the quality of the dissertations in writing

previously submitted, we, the Faculty of Surgery and Medicine of the

University of Schwärz-Brettingen--would a more satisfaction-imparting

result have anticipated as the result of the just-concluded oral

examination undergone by you.... But although lacking in

_Gedächtniss_--has been manifested on your part a so-remarkable

degree of _Einbildung_ and _Begriff_ that the Faculty

of-hesitation-none-whatever have in the

following-advice-to-you-imparting;--Yourself another semester give,

or better still, another twelvemonth! and try again, young man!--try

again!"

Not bad advice, if the young man had chosen to follow it. But

January drew near, and the inheritor-expectant of seven thousand

pounds scorned to toil and moil over intellectual ground already

traversed. He had tried for honors, and he had failed, thanks to the

hypnotizing methods of the too-agile Troppenritt.

So P. C. Breagh spent the money that would have kept him, with

economy, for six months, in giving a farewell banquet to his friends;

called--in his best attire, with kid gloves and a buttonhole

bouquet--on his favorite lecturers; left cards on the wives of those

who possessed them; paid his landlady--who had faithfully labored to

convert his formal, class-room German into a malleable, useful

tongue,--kissed her round cheek--tipped the civil servant-maid five

dollars,--and turned his back for ever on Schwärz-Brettingen, its

_Aula, Collegien-Haus, Theatrum Anatomicum_, Botanical Garden,

Library and Career--(a correctional edifice the interior

accommodations of which were only known to him by hearsay),--its

restaurants, beer-saloons, coffee-gardens, and fencing-halls; its

chilly wood-stoves, its glowing enthusiasms; its pleasant

companionships, its passing flirtations with _schoppen_-bearing

Hebes, and nymphs of the coffee-garden, restaurant, or ninepin alley.

One cannot say its love-affairs, because in the esteem of P. C.

Breagh--though Passion might bloom red by the wayside at every mile

of a man's journey--Love was a rare blossom found once in a lifetime,

too often never found at all.

P. C. Breagh's idea of Love was that it should be spelt with a

capital, and spoken of in whispers. Nor, let us hint, was the ideal

Woman at whose feet, he promised himself, he would one day pour forth

all the gold and jewels of his heart and intellect, a being to be

lightly trifled with.

To commence with, she would have to be six feet high or

thereabouts.... Blue-eyed, blonde-haired, of classical features,

cream-and-rose complexion, powerful intellect and thews matching, the

ideal woman of P. C. Breagh must have weighed about fourteen stone.

He imagined her a kind of Britomart-Krimhilde-Brünhilde-Isolde--with

a dash of Mary Queen of Scots, Kingsley's Hypatia, and a spice of

Edith Dombey and the beautiful shrewish Roman Princess out of "The

Cloister and the Hearth"--though these heroines were jetty-locked,

and for this reason fell short of P. C. Breagh's ideal of female

loveliness. Fair and colossal, he had seen her over and over

again,--though a little too roseate and pulpy in texture to come up

to his ideal--in the vast canvases of Kaulbach and in the

overwhelming frescoes of the Bavarian Spiess. But he had never yet

encountered her in the flesh. One day they would meet--and she would

be scornful of the young, obscure, unknown man who looked at her--she

felt it from the first, and that made her quite furious!--with the

eye of a consciously superior being--a master in posse.

All the masculine world would bow down before the intellect combined

with the beauty--of Britomart-Kriemhilde-Brünhilde-Isolde--and so on,

for he amalgamated new heroines with the others, in the course of his

reading. But one man lived who would not bow down. She would taunt

him with this stiff-necked pride of his, in the course of an

interview on the terrace of a castle, whose moat he had swum and

whose guarded ramparts he had scaled in order to be discovered,

scorning her, and communing with the moon. And he would quell her

tempestuous wrath, and silence her reproaches, by telling her that it

was for her to pay homage and court smiles. Then she would summon

her vassals and lovers, and half a dozen of them would set upon P. C.

Breagh, who would strangle one with his naked hands, run another

through with his own sword--and provide materials, broadly speaking,

for half a dozen first-class funerals--before he leapt into the moat,

carrying a rose that she had dropped between his teeth---and "_gained

the distant bank in safety,_" or "_dripping and bloody, emerged from

the dark water, gripped an iron chain, eaten with the rust of

centuries, and, painfully scaling the frowning masonry, disappeared

into the..._" etc.

Absurd, if you will, and bombastic and impossibly high-flown. Yet

such boyish dreams keep the soul clean and the body from grosser

stain. Walking with your head erect you may stub your toe, and come

a cropper on the stones occasionally. But you pick yourself up again

and proceed more warily--none the less rejoicing, seeing the splendor

of the sunset, or braving the blaze of noonday, or drinking in the

delicate spring-like hues of dawn....

One does not know how long P. C. Breagh might have remained upon the

steps of St. Dunstan's, had not the hour of twelve sounded from the

new clock--a youngster barely forty years old--that had replaced the

gong-hammering wooden giants, now on view outside the Marquis of

Hertford's villa in Regent's Park. A constable civilly asked him to

move on. He got up, heavily, and mechanically felt for his watch

that was in keeping of the landlord of the fourth-rate hostelry in

the Euston Road. And it occurred to him--as a pin-prick among

innumerable stiletto strokes--that the watch alone, being a heavy

silver one attached to a slender gold snake-chain once the property

of dead Milly--would have satisfied the man's claim, which,

exorbitant as it was for the accommodation afforded, was considerably

under three pounds. You are to understand that P. C. Breagh had been

so certain of returning in a few hours, heavy with ready money, that

he had treated the landlord's detention of his luggage as a joke.

The present situation was no joke. But Youth preserves above all the

property of rising unbruised and elastic from a tumble, and of

healing readily when it has sustained mental or physical wounds!

The blood in the veins of P. C. Breagh was mingled with the finer

strain that came from the breed of Fermeroy. He had no idea of

finding a craven's refuge in suicide. The single shilling remaining

to him might purchase sufficient strychnine for a painful, unheroic

exit, but P. C. Breagh was not disposed to invest his remaining

capital in that unpleasant alkaloid. And neither did it occur to him

then to test the depth and drowning-capacity of the muddy liquid

running under any one of London's bridges, from Westminster to the

Tower. For by the contradictory law of Nature, reversing scientific

fact, a helpless weight that hung about his strong young neck kept

his moral head above the turbid waters of Despondency.

He was not alone in the world. There was Monica. With the

remembrance of that frail link, binding him to the rest of humanity,

awakened in him the desire to see her. He turned his face Westward

and stepped into the moving throng.